Activists From England

"Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord why don't we?"

"You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs I look around me and I see it isn't so Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs And what's wrong with that? I'd like to know 'Cause here I go again... I love you."

"I thought the only lonely place was on the moon."

"The long and winding road that leads to your door Will never disappear, I've seen that road before it always leads me here, Leads me to your door."

"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."

"Obladi oblada life goes on bra Lala how the life goes on"

"Hey Jude, don't make it bad Take a sad song and make it better. Remember to let her into your heart Then you can start to make it better."

"Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four?"

"Lovely Rita, Meter Maid, nothing could come between us. When it gets dark I'll tow your heart away"

"I want her everywhere and if she's beside me I know I need never care. But to love her is to need her Everywhere, knowing that love is to share each one believing that love never dies watching her eyes and hoping I'm always there."

"To lead a better life, I need my love to be here. Here, making each day of the year, Changing my life with a wave of her hand. Nobody can deny that there's something there."

"Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play Now I need a place to hide away. Oh, I believe in yesterday."

"Why she had to go I don't know, she wouldn't say I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday."

"Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away Now it looks as though they're here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday."

"Apathy can only be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things, first an ideal which takes the imagination by storm, and second a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal out into practice."

"The Radical creed, as I understand it, is this: We have not abandoned our old belief in liberty, justice, and Self-help, but we say that under certain conditions the people cannot help themselves, and that then they should be helped by the State representing directly the whole people. In giving this State help, we make three conditions: first, the matter must be one of primary social importance; next, it must be proved to be practicable; thirdly, the State interference must not diminish self-reliance. Even if the chance should arise of removing a great social evil, nothing must be done to weaken those habits of individual self-reliance and voluntary association which have built up the greatness of the English people. But — to take an example of the State doing for a section of the people what they could not do for themselves — I am not aware that the Merchant Shipping Act has diminished the self-reliance of the British sailor. We differ from Tory Socialism in so far as we are in favour, not of paternal, but of fraternal government, and we differ from Continental Socialism because we accept the principle of private property, and repudiate confiscation and violence. With Mazzini, we say the worst feature in Continental Socialism is its materialism. It is this indeed which utterly separates English Radical Socialists from Continental Socialists — our abhorrence and detestation of their materialistic ideal. To a reluctant admission of the necessity for State action, we join a burning belief in duty, and a deep spiritual ideal of life. And we have more than an abstract belief in duty, we do not hesitate to unite the advocacy of social reform with an appeal to the various classes who compose society to perform those duties without which all social reform must be merely delusive. To the capitalists we appeal to use their wealth, as many of their order already do, as a great national trust, and not for selfish purposes alone. We exhort them to aid in the completion of the work they have well begun, and, having admitted the workmen to political independence, not to shrink from accepting laws and carrying out plans of social reform directed to secure his material independence. To the workman we appeal by the memory and traditions of his own sufferings and wrongs to be vigilant to avoid the great guilt of inflicting upon his fellow-citizens the injustice from which he has himself escaped."

"On the eve of the industrial revolution there were on every side signs of political change. But the French Revolution frightened statesmen, and political reform in England was delayed for nearly half a century."

"The destruction of the old bonds between employers and workmen was not peculiar to manufactures; it came to pass in agriculture also. An agrarian as well as an industrial revolution had taken place. Scientific methods of cultivation had been substituted for unscientific; vast enclosures had been made; traces of the old three-field system of apportioning the land were fast disappearing; small farms were giving way to large. A new race of farmers, corresponding to the new race of manufacturers, had sprung into existence, who, enriched by the high prices which prevailed during the great war, changed their habits of life. The labourer ceased to be a member of the farmer's household, and, to use Cobbett's words, was thrust out of the farm-house into a hovel."

"In the middle of the last century there was comparatively little movement of workmen from place to place; but Adam Smith's fierce attack on the law of settlement shows that migration was on the increase. The world was, in fact, on the eve of an industrial revolution; and it is interesting to remember that the two men who did most to bring it about, Adam Smith and James Watt, met, as I have mentioned, in Glasgow, when one was dreaming of the book, and the other of the invention, which were to introduce a new industrial age."

"We must remember that the real problem is not how to produce some improvement in the condition of the working man— for that has to a certain extent been attained already— but how to secure his complete material independence."

"There remains the ordinary Communist solution. This has taken various forms; the simplest being a voluntary association of individuals based on the principle of common property, and in which every person works for the community according to fixed rules. There are many successful instances of this, on a small scale, in the United States, but we cannot suppose such a solution to be possible for society as a whole. It has only been tried with picked materials, whereas our object is rather to improve the great mass of the population. The Communism of recent European theorists, of whom the best known is Lassalle, presents a somewhat different aspect. It aims at the appropriation of all instruments of production by the State, which is to take charge of the whole national industry and direct it. But the practical difficulty of such a scheme is obviously overwhelming. The objections to a Communistic solution do not apply to Socialism in a more modified shape. Historically speaking, Socialism has already shown itself in England in the extension of State interference. It has produced the Factory Laws, and it is now beginning to advance further and interfere directly in the division of produce between the workmen and their employers"

"The Comtists are right when they say that men's moral ideas are not fixed. The attitude of public opinion towards slavery was completely changed in twenty or thirty years. Still I am obliged to believe that such a moral revolution as the Comtists hope for is not possible within a reasonable space of time."

"We must expect for a long time yet to see capitalists still striving to obtain the highest possible profits. But observe, that the passion for wealth is certainly in some senses new. It grew up very rapidly at the beginning of the present century; it was not so strong in the last century, when men were much more content to lead a quiet easy life of leisure. The change has really influenced the relations between men; but in the future it is quite possible that the scramble for wealth may grow less intense, and a change in the opposite direction take place."

"It is a great law of social development that the movement from slavery to freedom is also a movement from security to insecurity of maintenance."

"You must pursue facts for their own sake, but penetrated with a vivid sense of the problems of your own time. This is not a principle of perversion, but a principle of selection. You must have some principle of selection, and you could not have a better one than to pay special attention to the history of the social problems which are agitating the world now, for you may be sure that they are problems not of temporary but of lasting importance."

"Party historians go to the past for party purposes; they seek to read into the past the controversies of the present."

"It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present, and go to that past to seek large views of what is of lasting importance to the human race."

"The proper limits of Government interference are relative to the nature of each particular state and the stage of its civilisation. It is a matter of great importance at the present day for us to discover what these limits are in our own case, for administration bids fair to claim a large share of our attention in the future."

"The right method in any particular case must be largely determined by the nature of the problem."

"Economists, firstly, regard only one part of man's nature, and treat him simply as a money-making animal; secondly, they disregard the influence of custom, and only take account of competition. Certain laws are laid down under these assumptions; as, for instance, that the rate of wages always tends to an equality, the permanent difference obtaining in various employments being only sufficient to balance the favourable or unfavourable circumstances attending each of them — a law which is only true after a certain stage of civilisation and in so far as the acquisition of wealth is the sole object of men."

"When a society moves from allocating resources by custom and tradition to allocating resources by markets, they may be said to have undergone an industrial revolution."

"The greatest punishment for those who are not interested in politics is that they are governed by people who are."

"It was the excess to which imaginary systems of religion had been carried, and the intolerance, persecutions, burnings, and massacres, they occasioned, that first induced certain persons to propagate infidelity; thinking, that upon the whole, that it was better not to believe at all, than to believe a multitude of things and complicated creeds, that occasioned so much mischief in the world. But those days are past, persecution has ceased, and the antidote then set up against it has no longer even the shadow of apology. We profess, and we proclaim in peace, the pure, unmixed, comfortable, and rational belief of a God, as manifested to us in the universe. We do this without any apprehension of that belief being made a cause of persecution as other beliefs have been, or of suffering persecution ourselves. To God, and not to man, are all men to account for their belief."

"I never tire of reading Tom Paine."

"Ideas of female equality were in the air during and after the Revolution. Tom Paine spoke out for the equal rights of women. And the pioneering book of Mary Wollstonecraft in England, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was reprinted in the United States shortly after the Revolutionary War."

"Paine and Voltaire had their admirers; and when it was a punishable offence to read the works of the former, a few, who thought highly of his Rights of Man and Age of Reason, would assemble in secret places on the mountains, and, taking the works from concealed places under a large boulder or so, read them with great unction. But if Paine had admirers he had also enemies, for at the same time religious men had the nails in their boots arranged to form T. P., that then they might figuratively tread Tom Paine underfoot."

"I have been lately introduced to the famous Thomas Paine, and like him very well. He is vain beyond all belief, but he has reason to be vain, and for my part I forgive him. He has done wonders for the cause of liberty, both in America and Europe, and I believe him to be conscientiously an honest man. He converses extremely well; and I find him wittier in discourse than in his writings, where his humour is clumsy enough."

"[T]he Rights of Man is a foundation-text of the English working-class movement... Paine speaks for the governed, and assumes that the authority of government derives from conquest and inherited power in a class-based society... What he gave to the people was a new rhetoric of radical egalitarianism, which touched the deepest responses of the ‘free-born Englishman’ and which penetrated the sub-political attitude of the urban working people... [T]he Paine tradition runs strongly through the popular journalism of the nineteenth century... It is strongly challenged in the 1880s, but the tradition and the rhetoric are still alive in Blatchford and in the popular appeal of Lloyd George. We can almost say that Paine established a new framework within which Radicalism was confined for nearly 100 years."

"The First Amendment to the United States Constitution encourages a diversity of religions but does not prohibit criticism of religion. In fact it protects and encourages criticism of religion. Religions ought to be subject to at least the same degree of skepticism as, for example, contentions about UFO visitations or Velikovskian catastrophism. I think it is healthy for the religions themselves to foster skepticism about the fundamental underpinnings of their evidential bases. There is no question that religion provides a solace and support, a bulwark in time of emotional need, and can serve extremely useful social roles. But it by no means follows that religion should be immune from testing, from critical scrutiny, from skepticism. It is striking how little skeptical discussion of religion there is in the nation that Tom Paine, the author of The Age of Reason, helped to found. I hold that belief systems that cannot survive scrutiny are probably not worth having."

"What a pity the world had only one Thomas Paine!"

"When Bonaparte returned from Italy he called on Mr. Paine and invited him to dinner: in the course of his rapturous address to him he declared that a statue of gold ought to be erected to him in every city in the universe, assuring him that he always slept with his book "Rights of Man" under his pillow and conjured him to honor him with his correspondence and advice. This anecdote is only related as a fact. Of the sincerity of the compliment, those may judge who know Bonaparte's principles best."

"When I came home from church, for a while, my father insisted on reading aloud to me from Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason-a diatribe against institutional religion."

"For even some American leaders, such ideas were dangerously subversive. Adams, who recognized Paine’s genius but feared his book’s influence, called Paine a “disastrous meteor” whose appearance portended disorder and tumult. Paine wasn’t merely making a case against monarchy and for American independence—he was offering a thrilling vision of America as a refuge for liberty and equality, a laboratory for self-government, independent not just from Britain but from all the existing institutions that kept people in their places. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he announced. “The birthday of a new world is at hand.” This year, the 250th birthday of the nation Paine helped write into existence is at hand. But with a leader who yearns for the powers of a king and an administration working to discount the currency of our most Revolutionary ideals, we seem to be reverting to the old world Paine wished to bury. His pamphlet, a provocation then, is perhaps the provocation we need now. It remains true that “men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent.” It is not theoretical that some figure “laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.” And as freedom is being “hunted around the globe,” we would do well to remember that America was born, in aspiration at least, as a home for the fugitive and “an asylum for mankind.”"

"It did not do so by accident. Paine crafted Common Sense as a kind of talking book; its pages are alive with the voices and scenes of the Revolutionary moment. John Adams complained that Common Sense sounded like it was written by a former inmate of London’s notorious Newgate Prison, “or one who had chiefly associated with such company.” For Paine, this was high praise. He wished for Common Sense to sound like what one might hear in the tavern, the shop, the coffeehouse, or the street. Anticipating public readings, he fashioned the text as something of a script, adding italics and capitals to direct its performers to catch its cadences and hurl its barbs: “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’TIS TIME TO PART.” Paine’s argument for parting was as powerful as his language. His reasoning began with an indictment of the whole institution of monarchy (which he called “the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.”) What monarchy’s devotees claimed as natural and divine, Paine described as a crime of history. The first king? He was the “chief among plunderers” and “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang.” Such rhetoric announced a marked turn in the discourse on America’s relation to Britain, both in tone and target. Previously, the debate involved the abstract language of political theory and had largely focused on the question of Parliament’s authority over the colonies. Paine’s anti-monarchy appeal at once simplified the case and made it more democratic, shaking the foundations of a world defined by rigid hierarchies."

"Paine was an unlikely spokesman for American independence. When he wrote Common Sense, he’d only recently arrived in America from England. He was 37, and mostly a failure after turns as a staymaker (an artisan who made corsets), teacher, shopkeeper, and tax collector. The two things Paine was best at—talking and writing—had at least landed him in useful company in London, and he’d left for Philadelphia late in 1774 bearing a letter of introduction from no less a patron than Benjamin Franklin. Not long after his arrival, Paine began editing the weekly Pennsylvania Magazine, taking on the horrors of slavery, the unwelcome presence of British troops, the prospects of defensive war, and the trials of marriage (another venture in which he had failed). With Common Sense, Paine, in the words of the American general Charles Lee, “burst upon the world like Jove, in thunder.” First issued on January 10, 1776, it was printed up and down the colonies in some 25 editions over the course of the year. Paine would later claim that it sold 150,000 copies, making it the best-selling “performance” since “the use of letters.” Whatever the figures, if Common Sense didn’t single-handedly convert Americans to independence, it gave words to growing feelings. As a Massachusetts man wrote to Paine, “every sentiment has sunk into my well-prepared heart.”"

"Thomas Paine may have exaggerated when he said his pamphlet Common Sense was the most successful publication “since the invention of printing,” but only by a little. Published 250 years ago last week, Common Sense is perhaps the most consequential piece of political writing in American history. At a moment when hostilities with Britain had already commenced but many still entertained hopes of reconciliation, it made a forceful and seemingly irrefutable argument for independence. As the Atlantic writer Frederick Sheldon wrote in an 1859 portrait of Paine, many Americans “stood shivering on the banks of the Rubicon” at the beginning of 1776. Common Sense helped them cross it. Reading it now, Paine’s words are a kind of portal back to the Revolutionary moment. Although Common Sense is an 18th-century text with 18th-century language and preoccupations, a live current still runs through it. To revisit what Paine captured as a turning point in human history is to be reminded of the most expansive possibilities of the American idea at its creation."

"In 1776, Tom Paine wrote in his rabble-rousing pamphlet Common Sense, "It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow." Well, the distance is closing, and soon enough no one will be safe from the sorrow of ecocide."

"It was the American Revolution's patriot and pamphleteer, Thomas Paine... who launched the social-democratic tradition in the 1790s. In his pamphlets, Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice, Paine outlined plans for combating poverty that would become what we today call Social Security. As Paine put it in the latter work, since God has provided the earth and the land upon it as a collective endowment for humanity, those who have come to possess the land as private property owe the dispossessed an annual rent for it. Specifically, Paine delineated a limited redistribution of income by way of a tax on landed wealth and property. The funds collected were to provide both grants for young people to get started in life and pensions for the elderly."

"Thomas Paine had passed the legendary limit of life. One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his soul. He was a victim of the people, but his convictions remained unshaken. He was still a soldier in the army of freedom, and still tried to enlighten and civilize those who were impatiently waiting for his death. Even those who loved their enemies hated him, their friend – the friend of the whole world – with all their hearts. On the 8th of June, 1809, death came – Death, almost his only friend. At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic procession, no military display. In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of Thomas Paine."

"As an act of kindness Mr. Woodsworth visited Mr. Paine every day for six weeks before his death. He frequently sat up with him, and did so on the last two nights of his life. He was always there with Dr. Manley, the physician, and assisted in removing Mr. Paine while his bed was prepared. He was present when Dr. Manley asked Mr. Paine "if he wished to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God," and he describes Mr. Paine's answer as animated. He says that lying on his back he used some action and with much emphasis, replied, "I have no wish to believe on that subject." He lived some time after this, but was not known to speak, for he died tranquilly."